The Incredible State of Almost

[vakkotaur]

Slashdot has had a couple recent articles about digital music/media players. There's quite a selection, however none manage to have the set features I'd like all in the same package. Somehow they all seem to manage to miss one thing - and I don't think I'm asking for that much when everything I do desire is in multiple players, just never all in the same player.

• I desire a digital music player that plays .ogg as well as .mp3 files. If it can also play other formats, that's a bonus. If not, it's not a deal-breaker.



• I desire a digital music player that does not demand I use Windows™ to use it or set it up.



• I desire a digital music player that has its own FM transmitter since I'd be using it in the car and don't care to mess with annoying tape adapters or fiddle with the wiring. And while an FM transmission might not be ideal for fidelity, remember this would be in a car where there's wind, road, and engine noise. Any loss of fidelity from FM wouldn't be noticed.

I don't need an FM receiver. I don't need a huge amount of space on the thing - four hours of music capacity would suffice, eight would be nice. More than twelve is almost certainly overkill. I certainly don't need it gold plated. I don't need a fancy display - I merely need to know that's on or off and if its transmitting, on what frequency. I don't need to record voice or radio. I don't even need much in the way to choose what it plays, really. It'd be nice, but while driving? Three main controls are all I really ask: ON/OFF, PREVIOUS and NEXT. Anything else is bonus.

It's easy to find stuff with many of the things I don't really care that much about. Nothing wrong with that, I could always choose simply not to use the "extras" or might eventually find them useful. But for now, I have yet to find anything with the three things I desire all in the same package.

Comments

[altivo.livejournal.com]

So which of these is the greatest obstacle? I'd guess that the built-in FM transmitter is kinda scarce. I've never seen one of those. However, a separate device that performs this function is only the size of a keyring fob. The one I have here uses a single AAA battery and has no controls to set other than the frequency, which it then remembers. It turns itself on and off based on the presence of an input audio signal.

Finding a player that doesn't require Windows (or MacOS) to load and unload files could be a pain. The news that many of us are NOT using Windows any more just doesn't seem to sink in. My present player requires Windows, and uses proprietary drivers that are not available for Linux. Consequently, I have to boot Windows especially in order to load files to it. Otherwise, I run Linux.

I don't use .ogg myself, so I can't speak to that.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

It's not hard to find something with 2 out of 3. The FM thing is perhaps the least likely. I had considered a separate transmitter solution but had not seen (admittedly, haven't been really looking for) as reasonable device as you describe. Pretty much I want to plug the thing into the accessory ("cigarette lighter") power and just get on with things and not fiddle around with patching this to that and all.